https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=e5HPOYCA6zI
Some of you will, you guys are young enough to know what a mosh pit is. Yes, you know what a mosh pit is. That’s, most of us associate wild with the mosh pit. I did. My whole teenage years was launching myself off, you know, I lived in a mosh pit. But when I got older, I started flamenco classes, you know, that kind of dancing. And I realized that real wildness is the dance partner of discipline. And actually things like, I have to go back because it’s my limited experience, something that the Divine Liturgy has these incredible dance steps to it. It’s always the same. The same thing happens. All these doors through the centuries keep opening up. But at the same time, good Lord, there’s something, the wind that goes where it will, you know, this uncontainable, inexhaustible energy coming through. So the kind of wild, to come back to, the kind of wild I’m interested in would be, for example, looking again at Christian mythology, which is lying in tatters around our feet, telling the stories orally, seeing how they feel to explore them, not with the kind of rigidity that we may look at a gospel reading, sort of fervently believing, but much more playfully. In other words, I think we should, as Christians, we need to rehydrate our imagination. That’s really, I find that really interesting. Do you know a bit about the passion play traditions in the Western medieval times? You know, they had this tradition of groups that would go around Europe with these wagons, and they would put on these passion plays, which were basically these cosmic stories. Sometimes they would span from the beginning of time up to Revelation, and they were these wild retellings with, they would open up the cart, and then in the cart there would be all these props, and they would have decorations, and people dressed up as St. Michael, and they would have this cosmic storytelling. And a lot of it, some of it would go into all kinds of genres. Some of the skits were actually quite humorous, they were farces, they were all these different types of storytelling. All these traditions have been so downplayed, and they’ve been pooh-poohed by the Renaissance and the return to classical form. But I think there’s something definitely interesting in those Western passion plays that would go around that we can explore and dive into, into what you’re saying, which is that it’s a kind of oral version of the story that is expanded, that is played with, that is, you know, it’s almost, there’s an improvisational aspect to the analogies also that would be brought together in terms of the way it was presented. So, you know, certain analogies would be presented visually between the different characters and between the different places in the story. That to me just seems like a very interesting possibility. In terms of, in terms of wild, maybe I could say one thing in terms of the wildness. I think for sure in Christianity, the wild, if you think of wild in terms of wilderness, right, in the way that it’s in Scripture, there’s an interesting idea, which is that if in the Old Testament the wilderness was almost seen, it was seen as a punishment for the Hebrews for not believing in God. In Christianity that gets reversed where the wilderness actually becomes a place of salvation and of purification. And so, you know, the monks in the fourth century, the madness that was going on in the Egyptian desert, well, these people running into the desert and like founding monasteries and like living out these completely, you know, improbable lives out in the Egyptian desert seems to point in the direction that you’re talking about in terms of something that was at the foundation of Christianity.